It was a thoroughly British affair – from the presence of Lord Bragg in the
audience to the paparazzi who snuck in to snap illicit photographs of the
star turn.

But how well would One Man, Two Guvnors, with its bawdy, end-of-the-pier humour and cockney rhyming slang, go down with our American cousins on its transfer to Broadway?

Judging by the audience’s laugh-out-loud glee and a standing ovation which left hero James Corden punching the air in delight at the final curtain, the answer is: very well.

From the toe-tapping skiffle band to the shouts of delight every time Daniel Rigby’s would-be actor Alan Dingle came on stage, the play is clearly going to be as much of a triumph on the Great White Way as it was in England, where it played to rave reviews. They even got the boarding-school jokes delivered by Oliver Chris as the posh Stanley Stubbers.

Writer Richard Bean had said he would make only a few tweaks to the script to cater to American sensibilities. Some of the more arcane cricketing terms have been removed, and a rather clunking reference to a Hostess Twinkie – a sugary snack not usually consumed in Brighton, where the play is set – jemmied in.

But plenty of British references remained – including a gag about Princess Margaret and a long joke about a “petrol station”, which was not, thankfully, renamed a “gas station”.

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Around a third of the voices milling in the bar before curtain-up at the Music Box theatre seemed to originate on the eastern side of the pond, and the rest were avowedly Anglophile.

Once the previews end on April 18 and the critics are allowed in, the real test of whether One Man, Two Guvnors can appeal beyond savvy New Yorkers and the city’s admittedly large British community begins. How will out-of-town visitors, who can make or break a Broadway show, cope with sporting terms and Thatcher jokes remains to be seen.

But as the play unfurled to shouts of laughter, it felt as if its hilarious physical comedy and high-energy slapstick would easily overcome any trifling differences in language and the perceived gulf between US and European humour.

One Man, Two Guvnors is based on Italian commedia dell’arte, with its tradition of clowning, farce and – in particular – audience participation. After one woman (apparently from the audience) was called on stage to take part in the action, Corden called for an interval “while she consults her lawyer”. This being Manhattan, you felt she might well be about to do just that.

One New Yorker in the audience, Sarah Walker, said afterwards that the jokes worked well. “I think Americans can cope with a few references to British things. I preferred it that they didn’t change the script a great deal, because there was more realism – it’s not too much to ask Americans to work out what a petrol station is.”

Alice Pifer, from Harlem, did have a slight problem with British humour in the form of the character of Alfie, the waiter, who, brilliantly played by Tom Edden, totters and teeters around the stage appearing constantly on the brink of collapse. “It reminded me of someone with cerebral palsy, and laughing at a disabled person is not nice,” she said.

Her friend Lin Campbell, who got tickets after seeing the play in London with her British husband, disagreed: “It didn’t bother me. I thought it was hilarious – we had a wonderful time.”

For Karl Lauby from Greenwich Village it was the fast-paced delivery in an unfamiliar accent that proved the greatest challenge. “There was a lot of humour that I did get, but some of the terms I didn’t. It was said so fast it was a little bit tough to follow. But Corden was absolutely brilliant – a real talent.”

None of the Americans was bothered by the very British – at time wince-worthy – crudity. “There’s plenty of crudeness everywhere in the United States these days,” Mr Lauby said. “We’re used to it.”

Let’s hope, for Corden’s sake, that the good people of small-town America agree with him.